There are a lot of interesting gameplay loops in Devastation that are just hampered down by a few heavy flaws. For one, I find the range limitation to be obnoxious. The only spell that makes sense to have a range limit is Fire Breath, because it is understandable that fire wouldn’t travel 40yds. But Living Flame, Azure Strike, Pyre, Disintegrate, and even Eternity Surge? None of those make sense to only be effective at 25yds when classes like a Mage or Warlock can fire off similar spells at nearly twice the distance.
Also, the class is riddled with sometimes game breaking bugs. Anyone whose played Evoker for a bit will have encountered the bug that prevents you from casting Disintegrate/Pyre even though you have the correct number of essences available to cast the spell, or Flame Breath/Eternity Surge failing to fire off for unknown reasons. It completely halts the gameplay and can even cost you an extension on Dragonrage.
Speaking of Dragonrage, I think Devastation’s mastery needs more opportunities to be activated. Why not a talent that allows one of our spenders to dip into the mastery on a proc basis? As it stands, we only benefit from our mastery under two conditions: a) the enemy is close to or at 100% health, and b) we use our 2min CD in Dragonrage. In every other circumstance, we are left progressively getting weaker as the fight goes on, which is counterintuitive to most encounter designs which increase the difficulty as the fight progresses, favoring classes that dish out more damage at the end of the fight.
I do hope something improves soon for Evokers. I do not particularly enjoy healing, so Devastation really is all the class has for me. I really do love the moment-to-moment gameplay when it works, but on a macro-level the class just needs more love.
Completely agree with the points you have made, I WANT to love Devastation Evoker, and when I am In keys I mostly do like Devastation. But when in raid I feel like i progressively get more and more frustrated at the spec.
Dragon Rage just doesn’t feel like a cooldown to me in raid, it just feels like a tourniquet for my hemorrhaging damage. It works in keys, because of the constant influx of of differing health targets allows you to offset the negatives of your mastery. But just like you said, in raid all you have is Dragon rage. Considering Evoker is the newest addition to the class roster, I was expecting Evoker to have a newer design, not just a cooldown reliant DPSer like several other specs wow has. If they want to keep Evokers damage so heavily tied to it’s cooldown I’d prefer to see a shift away from extending the cooldown to reducing, having to aggressively clip your abilities to squeeze out as much dragon rage up time seems like an unintentional aspect of it’s design, but if it isn’t I’d love to hear a developer actually talk about the design intentions of Devastation.
The rotation is solid, but watching those numbers go down as the bosses health does, while you aren’t doing anything different doesn’t and will never feel good, hitting disintegrate at 100% health and watching it deal between 20-30k damage sets a mental baseline, just to use it again at 20% to see it do 5-10k is so disheartening. (Numbers aren’t 100% accurate but just an example)
The problem is that dragon rage doesn’t ADD anything to the spec. It’s a CD that tries to make our mastery not suck as much. You know there’s a design flaw when your only real CD is simply trying to limit the negative impact of your mastery.
One thing I hate about Dragonrage is trying to determine the best time to use it during Tyrannical weeks. If you’re doing low keys, pop it at the start of the fight. As the key goes up, or depending on your group make up, its best to wait to use it as the fight will likely go longer. Varies from key to key, group to group. I don’t know of any other cooldown where you have take these things into consideration.
It also feels bad when I have to save Dragonrage, and use it outside of lust/heroism
Very early into the expansion Devastation got a pretty sizable damage buffs, and some very minor talent tuning (the talent they buffed you still don’t take because it just doesn’t work with the current playstyle of evoker)
But they still haven’t addressed the gameplay issues Devastation has, and the silence from the Developer ends has started to become deafening, especially seeing so many other classes getting piles of love poured on.
I know Evoker is the newest class to the roster and this isn’t me trying to discredit other classes needing love, 100% rets rework has been a long time coming. I just hope that they don’t spin the wheels too long on Evoker, because if they don’t make changes until the next expansion the player count is gonna keep going down, because even though Devastation is currently in the top 3 DPS for mythic logs, it has half the player count of Havoc, while a class can have a lower population and still thrive, considering the brand spanking new class has a lower population that half of the other DPS classes isn’t a good initial reception, while class design is subjective and not everyone will enjoy it, it seems more polarizing than it should be.
Geez, cry about it more. First of all the mobility you get as an Evoker balances out the range issue. Mages, Warlocks, and other ranged do not get to move around the encounter like an Evoker does. Bugs, yes these are a pain in the butt, however I find the rest of your complaints just petulant crying
A bit harsh, but I understand why you feel this way. Gameplay wise, I understand our mobility is unparalleled to compensate our gimped range. What I don’t understand is the lore reasoning as to why Evokers (and only Evokers) are unable to fire their spells at distances every other class is able to pull off. What is the difference between an Evoker’s Living Flame and a Druid’s Wrath aside from the spell school (and self-healing functionality)?
I enjoy the class, otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen to main it. There are a lot of great gameplay loops to keep me entertained while playing Devastation, and generally I am satisfied. I just wanted to share my gripes with the class and the justification behind the gameplay decisions made.
Personally I think a lot of the feedback you have given is constructive, and while yes all opinions maybe subjective I don’t think you have come across as “whiney” or “crying”, at the end of the day any and all feedback can be useful, even though it may not be acted on - it’s good to gather data points. Because likelihood is, if there is something you aren’t enjoying they’re other less vocal people also in the same boat as you.
Don’t let some negative comments off put you, keep it up!
Geez, cry about it more. First of all the mobility you get as an Evoker balances out the range issue. Mages, Warlocks, and other ranged do not get to move around the encounter like an Evoker does. Bugs, yes these are a pain in the butt, however I find the rest of your complaints just petulant crying
Unsure if you’re trolling or not, but there just isn’t any world where Devastation is more mobile than fire/frost mages or affliction/demonology warlocks. It has an argument against arcane mages and destruction warlocks, but that’s it. As long as empowered abilities can’t be cast during hover, this class just isn’t that mobile.
Not to mention hunters exist, with an abuts range to boot. BM IS the highest mobile ranged class. Period.
Our mobility should be on par with them, and that’s mostly just to make up for the shorter range, which they don’t suffer from.
Either we need the mobility fully unlocked (outside of Empower spells) or we need full range if they want to keep us how we are. I personally vote for the former than the latter but having only our aoe fully mobile while the rest of the toolkit is plant to cast unless we have hover or burnout procs is both majorly conflictive in playstyle but also doesn’t live up to the fantasy of having “superior mobility” as they state in the class description. Superior mobility is hunter, especially BM.
Simply not true in pvp, in arena a mage can cast a glacial spike from 40 yards away, and ice nova so you are forced to eat that damage because an evoker interrupt is 25 yard range. Please explain the counter play to this. Ill be waiting.
In beta i couldn’t stand how stupid the Mastery was for Dev, I was praying for a complete change to it.
Like… Who thought that removing damage the longer a fight goes on was a good idea lol
They could make the mastery work if they gave us an execute. I’ve made the suggestion that making all essence burst procs benefit from 100% mastery when used on targets below like 25% or 30% hp.
We get burst procs often, it wouldn’t change the tuning needed to dragonrage since we already get 100% benefit from mastery in Dr (unless you’re not taking tyranny, which I can’t think of a single instance where you aren’t), and it would make use useful against low hp priority targets and at the end of the fights when things tend to matter most.
Not necessarily the most elegant solution, but a solution nevertheless.
We had a few too many healers last night, so I was on DPS duty for the first time in a few thus on Devastation, and it made me re-remember what bugged me so much about our mobility again.
When I’m healing, most of the time I only hover when I needed to, as a nice backup kind of option or when something happens that I need to get to point B. When I’m DPSing however, because our big damage comes from Disintegrate ( a long channel) which spends all of its essence up front (a big number), I found because of the very RNG nature aspect of the game (SO MANY RANDOM SWIRLIES) I felt like I had to make sure I hovered prior to bursting out disintegrates, because when I didn’t inevitably I got swirly’d on (or in previous affix weeks, volcano’d). And then it means it feels awful when I don’t have a hover charge ready to go, and my mobility is a bit scuffed because I’m using our main mobility tool to try to not make my class resource be wasted.
This is why my personal big thing is less the mastery, and more the manner in which we are able to defend our resource usage from RNG. Whether this is hover being OGCD and not interrupts our channels (probably the less craziest/easiest idea), hover being permanently on (my personal favourite mostly because I love our hover animation and it’d make us actually mobile while maintaining dps like a hunter would, not mobile only for going from point A to B), or Disintegrate not eating all essence from the front and instead eating essence per tick.
There’s a good chance I’m still going to main it purely because of sunk cost fallacy between Kharnalex and… well Kharnalex. But I’d probably be more than willing to drop it to move back to my Druid or Monk in the event that Blizzard folk don’t look at threads like these and only look at usage numbers.
The bug preventing you from casting your Pyre/Disintegrate has to be the most annoying thing. It doesn’t happen just sometimes, it happens alllllllll the time. I feel like almost every other pull in a M+ it happens. I think I remember them saying they had “fixed” an issue with Pyre doing this but at the same time they reported fixing it, Disintegrate also had this bug but was never addressed. Thus, this fixed never even worked. If anything right now I would want this to be a top priority to fix. I think if they at least addressed this issue, I would be much, much happier with the class because as like you, I do not like healing at all and Devastation is my main spec.
All in all though, I do really enjoy the class.
